


bends and bends and bends

by blehgah



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: M/M, POV Second Person, Post-War, Stream of Consciousness, sex mention, vague timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-08 22:30:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4323255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blehgah/pseuds/blehgah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>During the war, you hate him. After the war, you hate him and he lives with you.</p>
            </blockquote>





	bends and bends and bends

After the war - though you can hardly call it that since, well, you’re not sure where the Great War ended and whatever bullshit this is started - you settle into a very minimalist apartment in Vancouver. Originally, you’re from the Boston-area, but you craved the mild weather influenced by the pacific ocean and god knows you wanted to avoid whatever crap the United States was dealing with when you got back.

It’s minimalist because you chose it to be that way. Really, you swear. Not because you’re afraid of getting a lot of stuff and becoming attached to it. Less is more they always say, right? You have enough funds from your off-shore time, but you know what, it’s a lot more comforting to have the numbers sitting pretty in the bank, collecting dust and interest.  
  
The balcony overlooks English Bay. There’s a gap between the glass barrier and the floor and you like to stick the toes of your shoes under it. It’s not a big enough hole to fit your entire legs through, unfortunately (which is a little odd considering you’ve always been on the skinnier side of unfit, but maybe lugging all that armour around all the time actually let you build muscle), so you settle on pressing your knees to the glass with your toes sticking out over the edge.

He can barely get his socks through the gap. You wonder how it’s possible for someone’s feet to be fat, but then again, with him, you can hardly be surprised about anything anymore.  
  
You hate him. He lives with you.  
  
You hate him  _so goddamn much_. There are scars in your skin, on your back, in your muscles and on your neurons and on the surface of your brain thanks to him. There are marks you’ll never be rid of and you hate them, despise them, hate him, despise him. There are metal plates in your body and an energy core in your chest and a fax machine in your ass and you hate him.  
  
You hate him and he lives with you and he hates you, too.  
  
He wears sweats all day. He wears your skin all day, wears your organs all day, even wears one of your goddamn eyes all day. He wears the stench of laziness and gluttony and fuck, you hate him.  
  
You exchange glances and he hates you, too.  
  
You spend a lot of time on that balcony. You’d wander the streets if it didn’t garner strange looks, and even when you’re brave enough to face the night, you can still see the strange looks aimed your way. The night vision was a life-saver back then, but in a civilian world, it’s just plain weird. You’ll never be able to shake off  _weird_  and to be honest, that’s all you’ve ever wanted.  
  
You never get what you want. You only get what you hate, and you hate him.  
  
You hate him and you hate Vancouver’s constant rain. It was stupidly dry in that box-canyon, and now the condensation coats your mechanic joints and you hate it.  
  
He grabs you by the arm and bends and bends and bends. You don’t break, though sometimes you wish you would. Sarge isn’t here to fix you up this time, and even if you did break, you don’t think you’d come crying to Sarge this time.  
  
Sarge calls sometimes. Mostly writes.  ~~You love him~~. You feel lukewarm about him. He’s not as brave as you thought him to be. He’s human, like you. Maybe a little more human than you, now that you think about it.   
  
(The gears in your head identify him as a brain in a skeleton and you as a computer in a skeleton. A somewhat metal skeleton. It hardly matters.)  
  
You miss him. Sarge lives on the East Coast and he sends postcards with Lopez. A glimpse of Donut is always to be found in the background, a wink or a lock of hair or an elbow. Donut’s always smiling. That elbow smiles, you know it, that hair wears a grin and you are 100 percent certain about it.  
  
He likes to circle the bits of Donut with a drying marker after you post it on your cork-board. You don’t say anything because you’d do the same, but he always manages to do it first.  
  
He grabs you by the arm and bends and bends and bends because you can’t do it yourself. Your joints are locked and they whine, they complain, just like him. They’re vocal and he’s vocal and he does it for you despite the fact that you never ask. They pretty much ask for you, and he’s always by your side to fix you up.  
  
You uninstall the fax machine from your ass by yourself. You throw it out, but it ends up on the counter the next day.  
  
He likes to draw. He likes to eat and nap and draw. He has terrible posture, gut protruding from that mangled body as he leans over paper, pencil in hand. The scratch of the lead against paper is almost as loud as the whir of machinery in your body.  
  
You like to watch him. You hate him, but you tolerate his existence in your shared space.  
  
He draws the shore. He draws the night sky a lot, learns to use charcoal. It smudges like a bitch and it’s funny when he gets black on his face and doesn’t notice.   
  
(black on his face like black on armour after going through a teleporter and god, why do you even remember that, the teleporter wasn’t even on your side)  
  
It’s not nearly as funny when he gets black on you and you don’t notice. Some moments, you mirror each other, borrowed parts and borrowed skin and borrowed expressions marred by charcoal.  
  
He licks his thumb and wipes it across your cheek. You’re disgusted. You should be disgusted.  
  
You smile, a tiny twitch of your mouth, and wipe at the saliva on your skin with the back of your wrist. It’s warm and wet and gross. It’s him, on your skin, transferred by your skin, maybe even your old salivary glands. It’s him and it’s you and it should be gross.  
  
You smile and he smiles back.  
  
He also likes to cook. He’s actually good at it. You suppose that’s where the gut came from.   
  
(His sister also sports that gut and maybe at one point she enjoyed his cooking just as much as you do. You wonder about her sometimes, but you try hard not to dwell on it.)  
  
He likes to cook and the smells stir the humid air. You hear it before you smell it, usually. The sound of the knife on the chopping board, the sound of juices and running water. The sound of garlic sizzling on the pan, the sound of butter melting, and the sound of pasta softening. You blame it on your robot brain but you don’t really mind.  
  
You notice that he watches you when you take that first bite. He’s hardly subtle, though he tries to be, but you’re trained to watch the way his eyes train on your eyes. Mismatched and intent and worried as your eyes have always been.  
  
It’s always satisfying. You wish you could say the same about him.  
  
Maybe you could say the same about him.  
  
Moisture coats your mechanic joints and he comes and bends and bends and bends. You let him take your wrist. You let his meaty, greasy fingers encircle your wrist. You let him touch you. It’s always him touching you.  
  
You touch him once. He was blocking the sink and you needed to put your dishes away.  
  
You touch him more than once. You put your hands on his back as he draws, touch the side of his thigh with your thigh as you sit pressed against the glass on your balcony, prod his stomach after a meal or two or three.  
  
You touch him to say thanks. You touch him to say hello, good morning (though he’s rarely up before noon), good night. You touch him to say fuck off, fuck you, just plain fuck.  
  
Fuck’s a funny word.  
  
You fuck him once. Or maybe it’s the other way around. The parameters of fucking and being fucked are weird and blurry like your vision used to be.  
  
His breath is heavy as it fans against your throat. His tongue tastes exactly how you imagined it to and you hate it, hate him, hate the way you fit in the crook between his legs and the way he clutches at your back and your waist and your hips.  
  
You hate him and he hates you.  
  
~~You love him and he loves you.~~  
  
You feel lukewarm about him.  
  
You fuck him more than once. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe it’s both. It is both, and maybe both in one night. Sometimes you don’t have anything better to do.  
  
He draws you once, gets charcoal on his face, on his lip, on the side of his hand and a bit in his hair, too. You lick your thumb and wipe it across his cheek. He’s not disgusted.  
  
He puts the drawing above his sketching table with masking tape and it doesn’t fall, not once.  
  
You sit on that balcony, knees pressed against the glass. The air smells of rain and your joints creak, whispered complaints under the cotton of your sweater. You pull your sleeves over your fingers and press your covered knuckles against the glass, drawing away some moisture. He comes to sit beside you, hip pressed against your own. His breathing sounds like the shore, like the water lapping the beach. His breathing sounds like the whir of gears in your body. His breathing sounds familiar. His breathing sounds like your own.

He clasps his hand over your wrist. His fingers climb up and up until his meaty grasp covers your covered fist, warmth permeating through damp cotton.  
  
You love him and he loves you.


End file.
